Kevin Drum

In the latest CBS/YouGov poll, Republicans were asked: If Trump wins, do you want him to take revenge against his enemies? No shilly shallying, no euphemisms. Do you want him to take revenge? Nearly half said yes:

On the other hand, a mere 24% of Republicans want Trump to shut down media that's critical of him. I guess we can put that in the "count your blessings" file. Another question drilled down to Republicans' most primal fear: will Joe Biden sell out white people? An astonishing 61% said yes:

White fear of Black advances has overwhelmed the conservative movement. It's recently become distressingly common on the right to blame any sort of inefficiency or problem on "DEI hires" or a "diversity workforce." This didn't come out of nowhere. It came from Republican leaders complaining about DEI in corporations, affirmative action in universities, and wokeness sapping the strength of the US military. Claudine Gay was a diversity hire who never deserved to be president of Harvard. Trans-tolerant policies are ruining military preparedness. Airport delays are due not to the weather, but to a diverse—i.e., too Black—workforce.

Racial progress in America has never been steady. White backlash lurks around every corner, and we're going through a phase of that now. But it's certainly dispiriting that this time around it's being led so explicitly from above.

Gaza is getting worse:

Famine is looming in Gaza, the United Nations warns. The World Food Program estimates that 93 percent of the population faces crisis levels of hunger. Disease is spreading rapidly. The World Health Organization predicts that the death toll from sickness and starvation in coming months could eclipse the number of people killed in the war so far — more than 24,000, according to the latest count from the Gaza Health Ministry, with the majority women and children.

Aid agencies say the chief factors hampering the delivery of lifesaving assistance to Gazans fall almost entirely under Israel’s control — the Israeli inspection process for aid remains lengthy and inefficient; there aren’t enough trucks or fuel inside Gaza to distribute the aid; mechanisms to protect humanitarian workers are unreliable; and commercial goods have only just begun to trickle in.

At the risk of falling into the trap of thinking that America can do anything it wants, I can't help but wonder if we have to put up with this reprehensible conduct from Israel. What would happen if we helicoptered supplies out to the Bataan and thence to Gaza, Berlin airlift style? Or used aircraft to fly in supplies directly to one of Gaza's airstrips? Or, for that matter, broke the Israeli blockade and brought in aid via ship. Is Gaza Port big enough for that? In theory this is dangerous, but would Israel really do anything if we told them this was a humanitarian mission and we were coming in whether they liked it or not?

I'm obviously no military logistics boffin and this might be the dumbest idea ever, regardless of whether Joe Biden would be willing to do it. But is it dumb to even ask the question?

The accusations of genocide against Israel have mostly been ridiculous, but they won't be if we start digging mass graves in Gaza populated by victims of deliberate starvation and disease. This needs to stop.

That's not me saying it, it's Donald Trump saying it. Based on a discovery request filed Tuesday night, this is apparently going to be his defense in the classified documents case:

The court papers, filed in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., gave the clearest picture yet of the scorched earth legal strategy that Mr. Trump is apparently planning to use in fighting the classified documents indictment handed up over the summer.

....Mr. Trump’s filing appeared intended to paint Mr. Trump as the victim of the spy agencies that once served him and of purported collusion between the Biden administration and prosecutors who have filed some of the four criminal cases he now faces.

....In the filing on Tuesday night, Mr. Blanche and Mr. Kise asked Judge Aileen M. Cannon, who is overseeing the classified documents case, to force Mr. Smith to give them any “documents and communications reflecting bias and/or political animus toward President Trump” by members of his own prosecution team.

Poor Donald, always a victim. What he's saying here is that he plans to turn the trial into a political circus, claiming that the charges were only brought in the first place because everyone has it out for him. If not for that, he would have gotten away with everything.

This isn't surprising. The evidence against Trump in the documents case is so overwhelming that he really has no choice except to change the subject. So sure, he took the documents. And then refused to give them back. And then defied a subpoena to give them back. And then colluded with his staff to hide them when the FBI searched his house. But it was only because.......I don't know, because he was fighting a righteous battle against corrupt apparatchiks on behalf of the American people?

Sure, that's the ticket.

How did Christmas turn out for our nation's retailers? Sort of meh:

December retail sales were down a fraction of a percent from 2022 but still well above their pre-pandemic trend.

China's crude birth rate dropped again in 2023:

China's birth rate dropped from 6.77 per thousand in 2022 to 6.39 in 2023, a decline of 6%. China's net population declined for the first time in 2022 by about one million. In 2023 it declined by 3 million.

As you know, the maternal mortality rate has been increasing steadily in the US. Except, as Noah Smith informs us, it turns out it hasn't.

This is a bizarre story. In 2003 the standard US death certificate added a pregnancy checkbox. As more and more states adopted the new certificate, reports of maternal mortality went up. But it was all a mirage. In 2020 the CDC performed a detailed study and discovered that when they ignored the checkbox and looked solely at the underlying cause of death, nothing had changed:

Now here's the kicker. If you go to the CDC's main maternal mortality site, it's absolutely littered with stark warnings about this coding problem. In the FAQ it says this:

The [2018] MMR is more than double the rate reported before the checkbox was added, but a rigorous evaluation confirms that the increase in reported rates is almost entirely because of changes in reporting methods. After evaluating more comparable data, the rate has not significantly changed since 1999.

This is unequivocal: the old numbers are wrong and the new numbers are right. But they haven't done anything about it! Figures since 2018 have been released using the old method with only tiny changes. Last year the CDC reported that maternal mortality had exploded in 2021 to a rate of 33 per 100,000 but the report made no mention that this was almost certainly a completely bogus number.

Nobody has done the work to update the figures past 2018, so on an apples-to-apples basis we have no idea what the maternal mortality rate really is. The CDC is just merrily releasing alarming figures that are plainly wrong without providing any clue about how wrong they are. What the actual fuck is going on here?

POSTSCRIPT: Both the old and new methods do agree on one thing: MMR is way higher among Black women than anyone else. And we still don't know why.

The Iran-backed Houthis in Yemen have been attacking Western shipping in the Red Sea. Over at National Review, Charles Cooke says we need to teach them a lesson:

We’re trying to get on with our lives peacefully, and they’re interrupting it. And if the consequence of us dealing with it is that they escalate it, then we escalate it further until we blow them out of the water. It’s just very simple. This is statecraft 101.

Well, maybe not quite so simple. Most of the Houthi attacks are coming from ground-based drones and missiles, not ships on the sea. We're trying to destroy this capability, but it's virtually impossible to get it done solely via air attacks. To truly eliminate the threat you have to eliminate the Houthis, and that means boots on the ground.

And even that might not work. After all, Saudi Arabia has been fighting the Houthis for close to a decade with no apparent effect. The Houthis continued lobbing missiles into the Kingdom the entire time until a precarious truce was negotiated in 2022. The Saudis never even came close to destroying Houthi missile capability.

This is the problem with the default conservative position on war, which is basically "Hulk smash." It sounds good, but even the US has limits. We can't escalate every conflict infinitely, and the last couple of decades have surely taught us that even when we try it doesn't always work. Who runs Afghanistan these days after 20 years of American war and 2,400 American dead?

Maybe it's time for statecraft 102?

Yesterday Paul Krugman mentioned that over the past couple of years the economy has been especially strong for Black workers. That's true, and the effect has been pretty dramatic. Here's the labor force participation rate, a measure of how many people are working or actively looking for work:

For many years, the share of Black men in the labor force was a steady 5-6 points lower than white men. In the last couple of years of the Obama administration that gap narrowed to 4 points. Since 2021 it's narrowed again and is now less than 1.5 points. For the first time ever, nearly as many Black men are in the labor force as white men.

This hasn't changed wages much. Among those employed full time, Black men earn 20% less than white men. This is about the same as it was 20 years ago.

Black women are a different story: they've always been in the labor force at higher rates than white women. Their gap has widened recently, but not as much as men's has shrunk.

Today I have some good news, some bad news, some good news, and some bad news for you.

The good news is that we've reached agreement on a bill that would modestly raise the Child Tax Credit.

The bad news is that—of course—Republicans have only agreed to this if it's offset with yet another tax break for businesses.

The good news is that the tax break isn't really a bad one, so the whole package is pretty good.

Finally, the bad news is that no one thinks this can pass.

This is a rock formation in Colorado called Elephant's Feet. It's pretty obvious to see why, but there are only two of them. Are they the front feet or the back feet?